Day for solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation — water is life, land is holy, rock is standing

Mni Wiconi — water is life. living water is the drink of samaritan wells and the bright Missouri when no pipeline passes through.

Land is holy to the nations who live there by their choosing and by their tears, those who were not consulted, those whose burial sites, and environmental wellbeing are on this pathbetween an oil field and a profit.

And the rock is standing, when all who have hands to join come together, children of the sacred land, water, children of the spirits of those who lie buried —

Lakota, Crow, a hundred tribes — and some children of the invaders, too, long ago and yesterday trespassers on native lands and ways of life.

This shadow shall not pass — not the Dakota Access Pipeline,

not the expectation that those with power will always be free to spoil the land, to poison the water, to buy the courts and lawmakers, to break the hands of protest.